page_title: History of Hungary
section_title: The Patrimonial Kingdom (1000–1301)
hierarchical_section_title: History of Hungary / Medieval Hungary / The Patrimonial Kingdom (1000–1301)
caption_attribution_description: Golden Bull of 1222
context_page_description: Hungary in its modern borders roughly corresponds to the Great Hungarian Plain.
  During the Iron Age, it was at the boundary of Celtic, Illyrian and Iranian cultural spheres.
  The name "Pannonian" comes from Pannonia, a province of the Roman Empire. Only the western part of the territory of modern Hungary formed part of the ancient Roman Province of Pannonia. The
  Roman control collapsed with the Hunnic invasions of 370–410 and Pannonia was part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom during the late 5th to mid 6th century, succeeded by the Avar Khaganate.civil
  The Magyar invasion takes place during the 9th century.
  The Magyars were Christianized at the end of the 10th century, and the Christian Kingdom of Hungary was established in AD 1000,
  ruled by the Árpád dynasty for the following three centuries.
  In the high medieval period, the kingdom expanded beyond Pannonia, to the Adriatic coast. In 1241 during the reign of Béla IV, Hungary was invaded by the Mongols under Batu Khan. The outnumbered Hungarians were decisively defeated at the Battle of Mohi by the Mongol army. King Béla fled to the Holy Roman Empire and left the Hungarian population under the mercy of the Mongols.
context_section_description: Hungary was recognized as an Apostolic Kingdom under Saint Stephen I.
  Stephen was the son of Géza and thus a descendant of Árpád.
  Stephen was crowned with the Holy Crown of Hungary in the first day of 1000 AD (1 Jan.) in the capital city of Esztergom. Pope Sylvester II conferred on him the right to have the cross carried before him, with full administrative authority over bishoprics and churches. By 1006, Stephen had solidified his power by eliminating all rivals who either wanted to follow the old pagan traditions or wanted an alliance with the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire. Then he initiated sweeping reforms to convert Hungary into a western feudal state, complete with forced Christianization. Stephen established a network of 10 episcopal and 2 archiepiscopal sees, and ordered the buildup of monasteries, churches and cathedrals. In the earliest times, Hungarian language, part of the uralic languages family, was written in a runic-like script. The country switched to the Latin alphabet under Stephen, and Latin was the official language of the country between 1000 and 1844. Stephen followed the Frankish administrative model. The whole of this land was divided into counties (megyék), each under a royal official called an ispán (equivalent to the title count, Latin: comes), later főispán (Latin: supremus comes). This official represented the king's authority, administered his subjects, and collected the taxes that formed the national revenue. Each ispán maintained an armed force of freemen at his fortified headquarters ("castrum" or "vár").
  After the Great Schism between Western Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity was formalized in 1054, Hungary viewed itself as the easternmost bastion of Western civilisation, a judgment affirmed in the fifteenth century by Pope Pius II, who expressed himself to Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III in these terms: "Hungary is the shield of Christianity and the protector of Western civilization".
  The Árpád dynasty produced monarchs throughout the 12th and 13th centuries. King Béla III (r. 1172–1192) was the wealthiest and most powerful member of the dynasty, with an annual equivalent of 23,000 kg of pure silver at his disposal. This exceeded the resources of the French king (estimated at some 17,000 kilograms) and was double the amount available to the English Crown. In 1195, Béla expanded the Hungarian kingdom southward and westward to Bosnia and Dalmatia and extended suzerainty over Serbia, a process that helped to break up the Byzantine Empire and diminish its influence in the Balkan region.
  The early 13th century in Hungary was distinguished by the reign of King Andrew II, who acceded to the throne in 1205 and died in 1235. In 1211, he granted the Burzenland (in Transylvania) to the Teutonic Knights, but in 1225 expelled them from Transylvania, hence the Teutonic Order had to transfer to the Baltic sea. Andrew set up the largest royal army in the history of Crusades (20,000 knights and 12,000 castle-garrisons) when he led the Fifth Crusade to the Holy Land in 1217.  In 1224, he issued the Diploma Andreanum, which unified and ensured the special privileges of the Transylvanian Saxons.
  The Golden Bull of 1222 was the first constitution in Continental Europe. The Hungarian equivalent of England's Magna Carta — to which every Hungarian king thereafter had to swear – the Golden Bull had a twofold purpose that limited royal power.  On the one hand, it reaffirmed the rights of the smaller nobles of the old and new classes of royal servants (servientes regis) against both the crown and the magnates. On the other hand, it defended the rights of the whole nation against the crown by restricting the powers of the latter in certain fields and making refusal to obey its unlawful/unconstitutional commands (the ius resistendi) legal. The lesser nobles also began to present Andrew with grievances, a practice that evolved into the institution of the parliament, or Diet. Hungary became the first country in which a parliament had supremacy over the kingship. The most important legal ideology
caption: Golden Bull of 1222.
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